Is the Tariff Nonsense Stupidity or Corruption? (Both??)

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Suspicious trading around Trump's tariff moves. Dubious meme-coin marketing by the president. It all smells a bit off to Charles P. Pierce. Ordinarily, Last Call is reserved for Esquire members only. But for a limited time, we're giving all newsletter subscribers the weekly long read from Pierce, one of America's foremost political pundits.

Today, Charlie examines how Trump's greedy approach to political power has deep echoes in American history, tracing all the way back to "stock-jobbing" in 18th century England. As in his daily blog posts on Esquire.com, the piece is infused with historical context and his signature irreverent humor. We hope you enjoy Charlie's newsletter and consider supporting Esquire's commitment to quality journalism. —Brian O'Keefe, Executive Editor

Monetizing the Presidency

Too many of these stock jobbers & King-jobbers have come into our legislature, or rather too many of our legislature have become stock jobbers & king-jobbers. however the voice of the people is beginning to make itself heard, and will probably cleanse their seats at the ensuing election.

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Marquis de Lafayette, June 16, 1792.

Members of the United States Congress have spent this week accusing the president of United States of turning the national economy into a pump-and-dump shop in some abandoned office park on the south shore of Long Island. (And, yes, I've seen Boiler Room more than once. Why do you ask?) The president's sudden decision to reverse himself on his beloved tariffs, immediately preceded by his encouragement that "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!" on social media, began to grow aromatic almost immediately. Suddenly, the criticism of the tariff policies wasn't simply that it's a demonstrably lunatic way to run a national economy, but that it also might be a monumental insider-trading scam. From The Guardian:

The timing of the US president's posts and subsequent huge share jumps has sparked accusations of market manipulation. The Democratic senator Adam Schiff has called for an investigation, saying: "These constant gyrations in policy provide dangerous opportunities for insider trading.

"Who in the administration knew about Trump's latest tariff flip-flop ahead of time? Did anyone buy or sell stocks, and profit at the public's expense? I'm writing to the White House – the public has a right to know."

The Democratic senator Chris Murphy also wrote on X that an "insider trading scandal is brewing … Trump's 9:30am tweet makes it clear he was eager for his people to make money off the private info only he knew. So who knew ahead of time and how much money did they make?"

The New York Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for all members of Congress to disclose any stocks they had bought in the past 24 hours. "I've been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor," she wrote on X. "Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We're about to learn a few things. It's time to ban insider trading in Congress."

Chief among the suspects was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Several investors have used volatility in the stock market in recent weeks as a buying opportunity. The US representative for Georgia, Republican and Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, disclosed that she had made several purchases on 3 and 4 April – days when there were sharp market falls after Trump first detailed his "liberation day" tariffs on 2 April – including shares in Amazon.com and Apple. Shares in the technology companies rose by 12% and 15% respectively on Wednesday.

Senator Murphy has been calling out these shenanigans almost on a daily basis–not merely the alleged stock-rigging, but also the president's dubious (and mysterious) involvement with a meme-coin scheme. Now, on the second time around, the monetization of the presidency has a ragged criminal edge to it. At the beginning of March, Murphy got up on the Senate floor and blew the whistle very loudly.

"In the first six weeks of the Trump presidency, Trump and Elon Musk and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption. It's not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves. And their strategy is to do it all out in the open, to do it at such a dizzying pace that the country just gets overwhelmed or anesthetized or dulled into a sense that we just all have to accept the corruption – or, maybe more charitably, that this is just how government works, that government is just corrupt, and so the fact that it's happening out in the open instead of happening secretly, well, it's really nothing new.

"Democracies die when the very powerful people steal from us so regularly, so openly, so unapologetically, that we come to believe that it's normal. And listen, I understand that many Americans may think that all of this stuff just used to happen quietly, and the only difference is that Trump and Musk are just putting it all out in the open. And I'm not saying that there haven't been instances of corruption. Democrats and Republicans in this body have been accused of, and convicted of, acts of corruption. It has been a fact of life in American politics for a long time. But never before has the corruption happened this openly or this frequently. And so I lay it all out for you this afternoon in the hopes that it is not too late for us to decide to stand up, as a body and as a nation, to say that this isn't okay.

"The Trump meme coin is not okay. It's not okay for people who have interest before the federal government to be able to anonymously funnel money to the president of the United States. It's not okay for Elon Musk to have access to Department of Labor enforcement data, against him or his competitors, that nobody else gets access to. It's not okay to just cancel contracts that were going to Musk's competitors and substitute in his own business, just because he has the ability to do it as a friend of Donald Trump. The rule of law matters. Doing things by the rules matters. This level of corruption was not occurring behind the scenes prior. It is not just that the cover got pulled off of it all. And it's our decision, as a body and as a country, to decide not to normalize this scale of corruption."

However, accusing the president of rigging the entire national economy by way of the stock market is an order of magnitude beyond the simple fact that the current president's apparently insatiable and mindless greed. It is a form of corruption with deep echoes in American history and, beyond that, to the rise of capitalism in what was then Great Britain. In fact, among many of the Founders, it prompted the development of the first real bit of political invective in the American republic.

Senator Chris Murphy has been calling out these shenanigans almost on a daily basis–not merely the alleged stock-rigging, but also the president's dubious (and mysterious) involvement with a meme-coin scheme.

"I could calculate the motions of the heavenly stars, but not the madness of people."

–Statement Attributed To Sir Isaac Newton In Reference To The South Sea Bubble of 1720.

In 1688, when William of Orange came over to relieve James II of the throne of England in what became known as the Glorious Revolution, along with permanent Protestantism, the Dutch mercantilism system followed William across the Channel. Pretty soon, there was a Bank of England and a British stock market. With this came along the new British profession of "stock-jobbing."

A stock-jobber was someone who made markets for himself and for clients in the new British economic system. That these people could make money without actually investing their own unnerved a great many people. (The collapse of the South Sea bubble in 1720 didn't do the profession any favors.) Stock-jobbing managed to survive repeated attempts to ban it until it became institutionalized, and stock-jobbing was a viable occupation in Britain until Margaret Thatcher's "Big Bang" financial reforms in the mid-1980's.

The uprising in the American colonies were a high old time for British stock-jobbers.The uncertainty prompted by the surprisingly extended North American war was a boon to stock speculation of a high kind. It was so prevalent that it enraged, among other people, George Washington, who wrote to James Warren of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1779:

"Speculation, Peculation, Engrossing, forestalling, with all their concomitants, afford too many melancholy proofs of the decay of public virtue, and too glaring instances of its being the interest and desire of too many, who would wish to be thought friends, to continue the war. Nothing, I am convinced, but the depreciation of our currency, proceeding in a great measure from the foregoing causes, aided by stockjobbing and party dissensions, has fed the hopes of the Enemy, and kept the B. arms in America to this day. They do not scruple to declare this themselves, and add, that we shall be our own conquerors."

After the war, while debating the Constitution, the issue of stock-jobbing became one of the more heated topics under debate. According to James Madison's notes on the Convention, Massachusetts' Elbridge Gerry stuck up for stock-jobbing as a reputable occupation. "He saw no reason for the censures thrown on them," Madison wrote, "They keep up the value of the paper. Without them there would be no market." And, of course, it was the primary impulse behind the split between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, who called Hamilton's plan to redeem war debts Hamilton's "gifts to the stock-jobbing herd," and that he considered banks more dangerous than standing armies.

So much of the political history of the American economy is a variation on those themes, from the brawl between midwestern farmers and New York speculators that fueled the populist and progressive uprisings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the reaction to the financial crimes that brought on the 2008 near-death experience of the entire world economy. The feeling that someone, mysterious and powerful, is pulling the strings is the basis not only for centuries of American political paranoia, but also for centuries of actual American economic crimes. The axiom that just being a paranoid doesn't mean someone's not out to get you ought to be emblazoned over the doors of every business school in America. It also ought to be the first line in any bill of indictment emerging from whatever the hell happened with the tariffs this week.